Graphic spam clogs communication channels

On some days, the level of graphical spam jumps up to 30% in the entire volume of spam traffic, Commtouch reports. True, such “critical” days happen infrequently. For example, on May 29, the level of graphical spam was 30%, and the total volume of spam traffic increased by 70%. Two weeks later, on June 10, the level of graphic spam was 22%, and the total amount of spam traffic increased by 50% compared to a typical day. On June 24, spam and traffic increased by 15% and 35%, respectively. All these figures make it clear that even a slight increase in the proportion of graphic spam greatly affects the amount of spam traffic.

Perhaps it is the spread of graphic spam that is associated with the first in a long time increase in spam in mail traffic, which was noticed by MessageLabs in June 2006. In the first month of summer, the share of spam was 64.8% of mail traffic, which is 6.9 points more than the previous month. On average, for the II quarter. In 2006, the level of spam was 60.4%, which is 7.8 points lower than last year. The cause of the June surge may be just graphic spam.

The problem is that the average size of a text spam letter is 5.5 kilobytes, and the graphic one is 18 kilobytes, that is, more than three times as much. Therefore, graphical spam becomes a headache for telecommunication and mail providers, as well as for companies that store an archive of email messages of their employees on internal servers.
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In Russia, the situation is not so critical. “According to our estimates, the share of graphic spam is 10-20 %. It is difficult to talk about growth, as spammers are constantly experiencing new technologies, ”Alexander Kozlov, head of the Yandex spam development team of Yandex, told Habrahabru. He also noted that now graphic spam is not causing serious problems.

Graphic spam is a relatively new phenomenon that first revealed itself in the 3rd quarter. 2005 A mail message of this type consists solely of graphic images, each of which is slightly different from the other, which allows you to fool most anti-spam filters. It is also difficult to block because the body of messages does not contain any text or hyperlinks.